Letter XIX.

Edale in Derbyshire.

Derby, England, June 3, 1845.

I have passed a few pleasant days in Derbyshire, the chronicle of which I will give you.

On the morning of the 30th of May, we took places at Manchester in the stage-coach for Chapel-en-le-Frith.  We waited for some time before the door of the Three Angels in Market-street, the finest street in Manchester, broad and well-built, while the porters were busy in fastening to the vehicle the huge loads of luggage with which the English commonly travel.  As I looked on the passers by, I was again struck with what I had observed almost immediately on entering the town—­the portly figures and florid complexions of some, and the very diminutive stature and sallow countenances of others.  Among the crowds about the coach, was a ruddy round-faced man in a box-coat and a huge woollen cravat, walking about and occasionally giving a look at the porters, whom we took to be the coachman, so well did his appearance agree with the description usually given of that class.  We were not mistaken, for in a short time we saw him buttoning his coat, and deliberately disentangling the lash from the handle of a long coach whip.  We took our seats with him on the outside of the coach, and were rolled along smoothly through a level country of farms and hedge-rows, and fields yellow with buttercups, until at the distance of seven miles we reached Stockport, another populous manufacturing town lying in the smoke of its tall chimneys.  At nearly the same distance beyond Stockport, the country began to swell into hills, divided by brooks and valleys, and the hedge-rows gave place to stone fences, which seamed the green region, bare of trees in every direction, separating it into innumerable little inclosures.  A few miles further, brought us into that part of Derbyshire which is called the Peak, where the hills become mountains.

Among our fellow-passengers, was a powerfully made man, who had the appearance of being a commercial traveller, and was very communicative on the subject of the Peak, its caverns, its mines, and the old ruined castle of the Peverils, built, it is said, by one of the Norman invaders of England.  He spoke in the Derbyshire dialect, with a strong provincial accent.  When he was asked whether the castle was not the one spoken of by Scott, in his Peveril of the Peak, he replied,

“Scott?  Scott?  I dunna know him.”

Chapel-en-le-Frith is a manufacturing village at the bottom of a narrow valley, clean-looking, but closely built upon narrow lanes; the houses are of stone, and have the same color as the highway.  We were set down, with our Derbyshire friend, at the Prince’s Arms, kept by John Clark, a jolly-looking man in knee-breeches, who claimed our fellow passenger as an old acquaintance.  “I were at school with him,” said he; “we are both Peakerels.”  John Clark, however, was the more learned man of the two, he knew something of Walter Scott; in the days when he was a coachman, he had driven the coach that brought him to the Peak, and knew that the ruined castle in the neighborhood was once the abode of Scott’s Peveril of the Peak.